Second Tranche of 80th Anniversary Stories

In March we launched the first tranche of stories from our 80th Anniversary Archive. The purpose of the Archive was to act as a important milestone to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Society in 1936. The Archive comprised a story writing project, collecting together – over the course of 2016 – stories about people’s favourite Irish born ancestors.

Moses A. Boggan, captain of the Great Lakes ship Conemaugh

We now launch the second and final tranche of the stories, a further 30. These include such people as Moses A. Boggan, a ship’s captain, sailing on the US Great Lakes; Hugh Flack, a native of the small Co. Tyrone village of Coagh, who as a medical doctor served in both India and Australia; Elizabeth Scott, the Co. Antrim Presbyterian who, with her young family, followed her husband to the US and settled in Oregon; and Abigail Lowe, a women born in Tullamore, Kings County (now County Offaly) in 1832, and whose subsequent life in Australia became a tangled web of marital confusion.

And if you want a good belly laugh, be sure to read the story by IGRS member Andrew Galwey, ‘The Red Letter that was Read’, in the And Finally section. The forwarding on of a misdelivered postal item caused quite some confusion and not a little mirth along the way!

It doesn’t really matter that the long dead people depicted in these stories are unlikely be your own kin, because not only are they interesting for their own sake, but any family historian worth their salt will quickly see that they include obvious pointers to sources and research strategies that might be well worth following-up in pursuit of their own ancestors.